The release of a new update is typically a time of celebration for MMO fans but not so much today as ArenaNet’s flagship MMORPG game, Guild Wars 2, suffered a huge and unexpected problem following the release of its latest update. The update launched earlier today and was available to play for a short while before Mike O Brien, President of ArenaNet, took to the official forums to warn of an issue and the impending downtime.

[quote cite=”Mike O Brien, President, ArenaNet”]There’s a bug in today’s release that can cause soulbound items in an inventory bag other than your first bag to become soulbound to a different character on your account. We can fix the bug with no damage done, except we can’t straightforwardly fix it if you’ve moved one of those incorrectly soulbound items into bank storage. We’ll have to work on a solution for characters in that state. To prevent additional players from getting into this state, we’re going to shut down the game servers until we can fix this bug. We apologize for this inconvenience.[/quote]

Anyone with a decent amount of MMO experience could understand the disappointment for players but the quick communication and outlining of the solution was appreciated. However, that wasn’t the end of the story. What was originally thought to be an easy solution turned out to be much more difficult as the servers remained offline until O Brien posted another message on the Guild Wars 2 forums.

[quote cite=”Mike O Brien, President, ArenaNet”]This is an update to the situation where soulbound items have been incorrectly soulbound to the wrong characters. After further investigation we’ve determined that there is damage to almost all character records that were played this morning, not just to those who transferred soulbound items to or from a bank. To repair the damage, we will have to roll back the state of the game and characters to prior to this morning’s release.[/quote]

He went on to apologize to players for losing their progress and reassured those that made a purchase prior to the announcement, of either the game or Gems, will not be impacted by the rollback.